


gods and monsters

by endquestionmark



Series: take my soul away [1]
Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 05:04:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4334915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clark is still in his colors when he lights on the roof by Lex’s penthouse, because that’s the way Lex likes him: a symbol on his knees.</p><p>“Thank you,” Clark says, not looking up, and Lex steps closer, traces the edge of his skull with two curled fingers an inch away, not touching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gods and monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Written in parallel with [Tells](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ascanios/pseuds/ascanios) as a mirror remix based either on the prompt "Clark/Lex, loss of control, dark as fuck" or “Clark/Lex, just fuck me up” depending on which of us you ask. Thanks to [Winona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winonadanger/pseuds/winonadanger) for enabling and screaming in the distance.
> 
> Warnings for: [cracks knuckles] self-inflicted injury, gore, body horror, unhealthy power dynamics, and paying as much attention to DC canon as Snyder does.

Clark avoids the sun, these days, when he has the option; he’s seen the way that the city wakes up in spring, when the light has some heat to it, the way it blooms green and the easy smiles of the people that he passes, as if they too gain something from it, can feel it soaking into their skin and buoying them up, but his life is more complicated — and simultaneously more simple — than that now.

There is someone falling, far below. He doesn’t know who. Clark’s on an office building, one of the taller ones in the business district, all finance and legal and concrete-boned one-way glass, and he heard, from across town, the way that a secretary swallowed a sob and the sudden thrum of her heartbeat, and Lex had nodded indulgently and waved a hand, and now he is here, and now he is waiting, and far below — at the fiftieth floor, now — someone is falling. If he wanted, he could see, but that wouldn’t help; if he wanted, he could listen to the fading hum of their scream, but he’s heard enough already. He stands, and waits, and wants to dive after them with every fiber of his body, and instead he considers the sun, and the uneasy indulgence of it, a richness that promises regret. Across the bay, Gotham sits like a carrion crow, defined as negative space and absence of light. Above him, the sun is at its zenith, and he can feel it flare and boil, and God help him, it feels so good, and he can see the broken glass glitter as it falls.

The body is at the fortieth floor, now, which isn’t impossible, but is far from ideal. It’s easier for Clark to think of them as a body, because if he hasn’t been good enough, they will be. It won’t weigh on him any less, won’t be any less clear in his memory tonight, and the night after, and so on, but he has to try. He doesn’t beg, the way he used to, or jump, the way he did the first time, because that just means that tomorrow, or the day after, or a week from now, when he’s just starting to let his guard down, he’ll be too late, and instead of one investment banker pushed by a disgruntled former employee, it’ll be a school bus, or a nonprofit, or the Daily Planet’s business desk, just to remind him why this is happening. It’s bloodless arithmetic, the sum of his service and his transgressions and his value and the worth that he is constantly accumulating and bleeding by turns, and Clark goes to one knee at the edge of the building.

“Go,” he hears Lex say, a mile across town, where he’s watching this, no doubt, stolen cameras on infiltrated systems, and Clark doesn’t even pause to breathe in relief before he’s gone, dropping too fast to be caught on video.

When he hits the ground, it’s not as slow as he would like, but Lex had him do that once too — not pause to decelerate, just catch a body and keep going — and he’d felt bones snap, heard the splinters grinding and the swell of massive internal bleeding, and this time, he’s been good. He’s lucky. He gets to set the banker down alive, and let him walk away, and take to the sky again, and Clark is still in his colors when he lights on the roof by Lex’s penthouse, because that’s the way Lex likes him: a symbol on his knees.

“Thank you,” Clark says, not looking up, and Lex steps closer, traces the edge of his skull with two curled fingers an inch away, not touching.

“Fantastic,” Lex says, and Clark almost looks up in surprise at that, catching himself just in time. “How are you feeling?”

Good, if Clark is being smart; good, if he is being honest, too. There’s a heaviness to his steps these days, a certain awareness of the way his spine shifts, and of the sensation in his core, a tightness and a rigidity that was never there before. In the sun, it gets worse; he’s less himself, more anchored to the earth than he has ever been before, true, but there’s pain too, like ink in water, bruised and blooming and just utterly wrong, in time with his pulse and his exertion. Out of the sun, it’s the same gravity, the same increased pull, but the pain is more muted, less present in every movement.

Clark had tried, once, at the beginning, to tear it out, pulling at the leash, he supposes now — testing his limits — and it hadn’t been easy. He’d starved, in the dark, for days, before it was possible to dig his fingers, curled, to dig his nails into his belly, to drag them across over and curve his fingers into claws until he was belly-cut and bleeding all over the lab floor, concrete stained with it. He hadn’t been able to bite back the noises he’d made, then, shocked and raw; Clark hadn’t expected sensation, and he hadn’t expected the strangeness of it, untouched nerve endings lighting up as they never had before, searing and intimate and _wrong_.

The slick curl of intestines, slippery liver lobes and steaming tissue and the drying shredded edges of the wound: it had been no less than Clark expected, and in fact so much more. By the time he brushed crystalline edges he’d been curled on his side, so much blood on the floor that his feet were slipping in it, jerking helplessly as he grasped desperately for purchase.

Lex had found him minutes later, the kryptonite solid and cooling in his hand, and he’d sighed in disappointment, and Clark had hated, then, that he knew the difference between anger and disappointment. “I did expect this,” Lex had said, and knelt on the floor, the knees of his trousers blood-dark immediately, closing his hand around Clark’s and the fragment, pulling it from his aching fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Clark had said, and hadn’t known why at the time, until Lex pulled him up to kneel, back bowed, head resting on Lex’s shoulder.

“Shh,” Lex had said, one hand curled around the nape of Clark’s neck, gentling him, rubbing circles into his skin. “Good, good, you’re okay—” and he’d tilted Clark’s face up, then, to wipe his tears away with a blood-smeared thumb. Lex had pressed kisses to the tear tracks, to the bruising under Clark’s eyes, a token of days away from the sun, and finally to Clark’s mouth — not the first time, but so strangely sweet, and good, in the midst of his agony — and then, with Clark’s lower lip caught between his teeth, had curled his spare hand into a fist and _shoved_ , no finesse to his fingers in Clark’s guts, just incandescent pain and the anchoring of his bitten lip and the tug of Lex’s hand coming out of the closing wound, and the weight settling back against his vertebrae, the pressure and pull of it.

“Say thank you,” Lex had said, and Clark had barely heard it through the overwhelming sensation of the roughness of his throat — had he screamed? — and the ballooning agony in his abdomen, but he had tried to uncurl nonetheless.

“Thank you,” he had gasped, voice barely audible, against Lex’s thigh, and then, again, louder.

“You’re welcome,” Lex had said, still toying with the edges of the wound with his fingertips, testing them as the flesh knit, warm and raised and swelling around it. “Good, Clark, good boy,” he had said, rubbing the flat of his palm over blood-slick flesh, and the pressure of it had somehow been a relief, and Clark had curled into it, into him, and had let Lex pull him against his chest, and cradle him, and press until the pain in his belly burgeoned into a full-body ache, there in the ruins of himself.

“Clark,” Lex says now, warning, and there’s his hand, there are his fingers tipping Clark’s chin up.

“Good,” Clark whispers, even though it’s been long enough in the sun now that he can really feel it, the creeping corruption shifting and settling, and Lex smiles.

“Good,” he says.

 


End file.
